2012

Tory leadership frontrunner says she did not write infamous passage in Britannia Unchained, but the book's whole tone is now jarring.

Indeed, it is quite possible that at the next election two competing visions of the state will be the point of contest. China’s march to prominence has been accompanied by rigorous educational standards and intense spirit of competition.” The most remarkable aspect of the Chinese leadership is not their politics but that so many are engineers. By contrast, Korean students are lauded for “going straight from long days at school to studying all evening and weekends”. And that is all before you get to the chapter on the work ethic. “As British politicians we feel that it is particularly helpful to learn from the successes of China and other emerging economies. But credos and tracts written a decade ago to catch the eye come with these inherent risks. US technology is lauded and the dominance of tech in children’s lives admonished, without any link being made. Instead, we should focus on trying to make it easier for firms to recruit people and ensuring the tax burden is less onerous.” The Science Museum is scolded for trying to make its exhibitions relevant. The book is littered with calls for ever harsher medicine. They are hardly the equivalent of floating private health insurance in liberal democratic circles, something David Laws, a Clegg acolyte, did when he contributed to The Orange Book, a similarly controversial if less cohesive work, published in 2004. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.” The book got another round of publicity when four of the authors were handed big portfolios in Boris Johnson’s first cabinet, suggesting it showed the ideological frame of his administration.